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Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

Talk Cocktail

Jeff Schechtman

Jeff Schechtman talks with authors, journalists, newsmakers and opinion shapers, and sheds light on the issues of the day, from local stories to national and international headlines and ideas. jeffschechtman.substack.com

news & politics

All Episodes

27:54

Silent Cal and American prosperity

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/02/13

When FDR became president in 1933 he called for “bold, persistent experimentation.” He believed that it was essential to do something! This was a far cry from Warren Harding, who said in 1920, “that any experimentation will add to the confusion. Our best hope lies in the administration of our proven system.” Upon assuming the office of President in 1923 Calvin Coolidge world take these works very seriously. He would actually and literally carry out the policies that Harding and Coolidge were

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25:33

Lincoln astride the world: America's first age of...

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/02/13

America has long gotten itself involved in civil wars around the world. In Korea, Vietnam, Spain, on the African continent and more recently in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Syria. It should not be surprising then to realize that other nations were engaged in the outcome of America's Civil War and that it provided Lincoln ample opportunity to engage in foreign affairs. We think of Lincoln as our domestic president. Lincoln saving the union so that this nation would not perish. But he also

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21:30

iDoc 1.0

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/02/09

We look to technology as the panacea to solve so many of today's problems. Yet we fear technology. When it goes wrong, like stealing our credit card information, or not allowing easy access to a government website, we get angry. Clearly, our emotional nexus with technology is out of balance with our intellectual understanding of it. The price we pay is fear, alienation, confusion and a degree of appropriate paranoia. Few understand this better than bestselling novelist Dr. Robin Cook. He has used

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18:51

The Ghost Particle

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/02/09

Even in the world of physics, celebrity culture often rules. We’ve all heard about the search for the so called God particle, the Higgs Boson and the large Hadron Collider. Yet those in the know, in the astrophysics community, have had their eyes focused on another subatomic particle, the Neutrino. These may really possess the secrets to the inner workings of the planet and the universe. Ray Jayawardhana is one of our leading astrophysicist and in Neutrino Hunters: he looks into this ghostly

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28:56

The Repression of Putin and The Passion of Pussy Riot

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/02/05

In just days the Winter Olympics begin in Russia. In some respects the world comes to a nation that may be even more repressive than the Moscow of the 1980 Summer Olympics. While President Putin has released some political prisoners, including two members of the group Pussy Riot, the release itself was a kind of de facto acknowledgement of the corruption and repressiveness of its political and justice system. Masha Gessen has been a long time activist journalist in Russia and recently moved to

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26:56

Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/02/04

From the founding of the republic and the debates over slavery, until the passage of the Civil Right act in l964, took nearly 200 years. With respect to the civil right issues of our time, from the Stonewall Riots in 1969, to the President of the United States supporting same sex marriages, took 43 tumultuous years. During that time, three generations would engage in the struggle. A plague would descend upon and become part of the struggle and take the lives of many in the movement. Public

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15:28

Thank You for His Service

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/02/03

John Lennon who wrote that “life is what happens while we're busy making other plans.” Or as the old Yiddish proverb goes, “man plans and god laughs.” Artis Henderson experienced this in the most complex, profound and sorrowful way. After altering her own life plan, by surprisingly falling in love with a young soldier, her life would be shattered as his life would be taken in a helicopter crash in Iraq, shortly after they were married. She would become what in military parlance is

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28:26

The not so sweet reality of sugar

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/01/31

What are the forces that cause us to continue eating when we know we should stop? Why has the quality of food that most Americans eat, deteriorated even while more and more healthy choices are available? Why are our children experiencing an epidemic of obesity, and what role does the food industry play in this? And why, when controlling healthcare costs is supposedly job one, we allow the epidemic of obesity in America to account for no less than 10% of all of our health care costs? Is the fault

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23:27

The "poisoned chalice" of international justice

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/01/30

While the United States has, since it founding, prided itself on the idea of justice for all, those principles have seldom found expression in the international realm, until relatively recently. Former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who would prosecute crimes at Nuremberg, would lay out the case for equal international justice, when he said in his opening statement “that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these

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18:55

What Big Data Tells Us About Human Culture

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/01/30

We pretty well understand how evolution impacts living organisms. But is it possible that there is a similar kind of survival of the fittest at play with respect to culture, ideas or even to language? If so, with no DNA trail, how do we determine its history and what relevance does it have to creating a contemporaneous understanding of our culture and language? The answer actually lies in our use of what’s come to be called Big Data. Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, have detailed this in

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19:55

Secrets and Lies

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/01/29

From the highest levels of international and governmental affairs, to the most personal and intimate relationships, secrets and lies are often at the heart of so many narratives. We embrace privacy, yet we want truth. As individuals and as a society we spend enormous resources covering up unpleasant truths, only to find, as we seem to never learn, that the cover up is always tougher than the lie. Is there something in human nature or human psychology itself that makes transparency so

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13:53

Music, DNA and our culture of fear

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/01/28

We have all had the experience of hearing a familiar and likable piece of music from a long time ago. Suddenly the music short circuits time and makes yesterdays events, today’s reality. It’s as if that song triggers primal changes within us, that allows us to transcend both space and time. Now imagine if that was more than just our fond memories playing tricks on us. Image that the music had actually become part of us, of our DNA. This notion is a small part of the brilliant blending of science,

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20:35

The Power of "Microresolutions"

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/01/24

Everyday most of us battle our own demons. These Demons often prevent us from doing perhaps the hardest thing there is, that is initiating and adapting to personal change. With the New Year, I’m sure we’ve all made resolutions. By now most are long forgotten. Change is hard. Personal change is even harder. One wonders how anyone ever does it. Perhaps we can do it by a kind of personal mental jujitsu that manipulates the force of our resistance to change, against itself. This might work a lot

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28:19

Only the paranoid and fast will survive

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/01/22

SLR cameras, pagers, paper maps, travel agents, home telephones, answering machines, transistor radios; all quaint reminders of days gone by. Today whole new industries are taking over from the old. The way we find places to stay when we travel, transportation, even the nature of money itself, is changing. Back in the 90’s we heard about the “Innovators Dilemma.” About how cheap products would flood the market, before other manufactures could create products with higher value. Perhaps Sony and

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29:16

Can we be happy thinking about happiness?

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/01/21

Someone once wrote that happiness is serious business. But should happiness be a goal in and of itself, or is it simply a construct for achieving what we really desire, and helping us in finding our place in the world? Woody Allen in Annie Hall saw the world divided only into the “horrible,” and the “miserable.” What kind of a construct is that? Gretchen Rubin has looked at happiness from all sides now. She is the author of the NY Times bestseller THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, she is a former law clerk

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26:11

And now onto basketball...

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/01/20

The reporting of and understanding of sports always seems to be a balancing act between the importance of teams vs. the primacy of an individual player. Certainly in basketball, the decision was made a long time ago, that individuals stars would drive the NBA. Certainly many have over the years. But as much as any one player, one coach has stood atop the sport. With eleven championships, Phil Jackson is the master. But what got him there? Was it luck, timing, sheer basketball smarts, or a

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35:16

The Power and the Purpose of the Teenage Brain

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/01/16

A young Johnny, played by Marlon Brando in THE WILD ONES, is asked what he’s rebelling against? He answers “what have you got?” Rebellion and the youthful the desire to shapes one's identity, have long been a part of the adolescent experience. Today however we know so much more about it. About what goes on inside the brain that shapes that rebellion and the quest for identity. What we also understand, but perhaps as parents we don’t always practice, is the the kind of virtuous circle, or

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27:42

The uniqueness of how we deal with death

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/01/14

The recent controversy surrounding Bill Keller’s column about Lisa Adams, and subject of illness and dying in general, brings into bold relief just how personal the subject is. Dealing with death is little like marriage and fingerprints. No two are ever alike. We celebrate and mark weddings and deaths. But what what are we marking, what we celebrating, really. These are moments in time, the background and history, joy and sorrow of which, may have gone on for years before, or may come years

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22:35

Mistakes make us human

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/01/13

To live a full life is to make mistakes. Unlike Fitzgerald’s suggestion of "personality as an unbroken series of successful gestures," for most of us life is messy, complicated and often filled with regret and anger. When we look back we realize we are, in some strange and mysterious way, the sum total of all that we have done. The meals we’ve eaten, the books we’ve read and the people that we have touched and have touched us. Together it forms kind of life mosaic, unique and often

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29:28

Is torture ever justified?

Talk Cocktail ·

2014/01/10

Back in the dark days of the Cold War, John le Carre published The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. It cast a light, as only fiction sometimes can, on covert actions that are not a clear choice between good and evil, but one where the methods that western intelligence would use, disturbingly resembled those used by their opponents. The distance between us and them became blurred. It exposed the Cold War not as a battle between light and darkness, but a place where both sides meandered in the

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1,369 results

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